


The Map Table

by obstinate_as_an_allegory



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:55:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25307083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obstinate_as_an_allegory/pseuds/obstinate_as_an_allegory
Summary: Billy re-takes the Spanish warship, rescues a scoundrel, and speculates about the captain's behaviour
Comments: 1
Kudos: 23





	The Map Table

There’s nothing to do after they haul Silver out of sight but slump back onto the deck. Billy casts a gloomy eye over the men guarding them. All very well, isn’t it, for Captain Vane to offer thin assurances about the safety of the crew and then go ashore and leave this mess behind him. Now Billy is stuck on a captainless Spanish warship and tempers are fraying; men’ll do all sorts of things when they’re on edge. 

The men guarding them relax a bit once everyone has sat back down, and as the guns start sounding from the shore defences, they’re all half distracted with trying to make out the progress of the battle going on half a mile across the bay. It’s around then that Billy notices some disturbance among his own men—Joji and Muldoon are shifting a bit, and the men next to them notice and start fidgeting as well. Nerves, probably, though Joji’s the calmest bastard Billy ever met in his life, so it’s odd he should be the epicentre of it. Every man’s got his breaking point, though.

A pistol crack from the stern makes every head whip round. Nothing to see, of course, but a cold hand cramps Billy’s guts. Presumably Vane’s rabid quartermaster will be back for the next man, any moment. 

So much for John Silver, then. A man who’d caused no end of trouble. Things were never dull with him around, you could say that much for him—and, through some sorcery, he’d been staggeringly effective at curbing Flint’s worst excesses. Billy doesn’t know who the fuck’s going to stand between Flint and his determination to send every fucking man on the crew to hell now that….

He’s interrupted in composing Silver’s eulogy by another noise from the aft cabin—a bellow of agony. Perhaps he’s not dead yet, then. 

With the guards distracted by both the chaos on shore and whatever awful butchery is going on in the cabin, Billy’s crewmates are getting more and more restless. They liked Silver, is the trouble—a truly startling number of them liked him, despite knowing full well that he was a swindler, and a mediocre fighter at best. Dooley taps him on the shoulder and he puts on a sympathetic face, turning to him, but Dooley just shoves something into his lap. He looks down, startled. Fucking keys. 

Billy hasn’t lived this long by looking gift horses in the mouth, so he unlocks his shackles very quietly and passes the keys on to the next man before he squints back towards Joji and notices that half the crew are sitting coiled to spring, shackles loosely held in place ready to throw off. The ripple moves on; the men are doing their best to be stealthy but frankly, he thinks with very little guilt, it’s a mercy Silver is still making such a fucking racket. 

He’ll find out later and be grudgingly impressed that Silver managed to lift the keys from one of the huge bastards manhandling him, and somehow manoeuvred himself to drop them on Joji’s foot before he was dragged off. 

Alright. No point wasting more time. He catches DeGroot’s eye across the deck and nods. A particularly massive percussive blast echoes across the bay, and as Vane’s crew crane their necks to see what’s just blown up, he yells ‘Now!’ 

They have to be fast. The fight on deck is brutal but over quickly—Vane’s crew were caught with their pants down, in one case literally. The cabin is more of a conundrum. The senior crew members who are in there were the nastiest bastards of the lot, and the Walrus men’s superior numbers won’t help them as much in an enclosed space. Silver must still be alive, but his voice is giving out, less audible from the deck now, and the men are fired up righteously about Silver’s treatment in a way you don’t often see from pirates. 

He sends a vanguard through the door with some bombs for cover, climbing up to the stern so he can swing down and crash through the window. The quartermaster’s there tugging an axe out of Pollock’s neck, and Billy cuts him down in a couple of furious strokes. 

The cabin stinks of blood, and the first thing he notices is Vincent, fuck, he’d completely lost track of Vincent and apparently it was him who got shot, poor bastard. And Silver…

Silver’s lying on Flint’s map table, struggling to lift his head to see what’s going on; pretty blue eyes creased and clouded in distress. Billy moves towards him a bit reluctantly, taking in his left leg, bloody and twitching, an unknown number of vicious gashes making a jagged mess where his shin should be. Fuck. Billy doesn’t know whether to be relieved that he’s not dead. Not dead yet—a wound like that taken at sea, there are no guarantees. Fuck. He tries to keep the horror off his face, patting Silver on the chest and letting the wounded man grasp his wrist, sucking air in desperately. 

‘That was a good trick with the keys,’ he says. 

Silver grunts sharply, jaw working. 

‘Vincent,’ he chokes out. Billy’s mouth twists, looking back across the room. He knows a dead man when he sees one. 

‘He’s dead.’ 

He accepts that with a grim nod, then abruptly jerks back against the table, shuddering helplessly. 

‘We’ll get you to Howell,’ Billy promises. ‘Soon as it’s all clear on deck.’ 

He tries again to lift his head, peering through teary eyelashes in the direction of his ruined leg, and swallows. He’s taking this braver than Billy would’ve given him credit for. 

‘The captain’ll go spare at the state of his maps,’ Billy says conversationally, and Silver’s nostrils flare in what might be a laugh. 

‘Prisoners mostly secure now,’ Muldoon says as he passes, talking to Billy but his eyes straying uneasily to Silver. 

‘Get the bodies out of here,’ Billy tells him, jerking his chin toward the crumpled shape of the quartermaster, axe still in hand in a pool of blood on the floor. 

Silver’s fingers tighten on his wrist. ‘Dead?’ he rasps.

‘Yeah,’ Billy says, patting him on the chest again. 

‘Cunt,’ Silver manages. 

‘Yeah,’ Billy says again, smiling crookedly. ‘What did he want from you?’ he asks, regretting it almost immediately when Silver flinches as if struck.

‘S’alright,’ Billy says quickly, but Silver talks over him. 

‘Wanted the names of ten men who’d help him sail the ship out of here,’ he croaks. He’s obviously wrecked his throat with screaming.

Billy nods in grim understanding, and squeezes Silver’s fingers with his free hand. 

‘Clear above!’ calls a voice at the door. 

Billy nods, and looks back down. Silver’s not a big fellow, it’d probably be easy enough to just pick him up, but he’s already trying to move, chains on his wrists clinking as he rolls to one elbow. ‘Fuck, alright,’ Billy says, scrambling to support him before he crashes to the floor. 

Silver accepts the help well enough, clinging to the back of Billy’s shoulder, the chain on his wrists digging painfully into the back of his neck. When they get upright Silver goes completely limp for a second and Billy scrambles to grab him by the belt. His head comes back up almost immediately, and Billy feels the shock judder through his frame when his toes scrape against the floor. 

It would have been far easier to just pick him up. It takes Silver a couple of steps to realise that while he can move his left leg normally from the hip, he absolutely should not be trying to walk; it’s not just that he can’t put weight on it, the slightest jostle of his foot against the floor makes him sob in agony. 

‘Just let me,’ Billy hisses at him in frustration, hauling him sideways through the door. 

The deck’s teeming with activity. Vane’s crewmen returning from the shore are quickly apprehended as they come over the rail, and DeGroot’s squinting through a glass at a smaller launch just coming loose from the jetty. 

Billy hands off Silver to the two nearest crewmen; there are no shortage of volunteers. Every man on the crew is all too aware that between the forestay, the keys, and the confrontation with Vane’s quartermaster, Silver has pretty much single-handedly kept them all alive since Captain Vane’s arrival. 

XXX

He won’t hold pirates prisoner on this ship. Huh. 

It’s all very well in theory, but Flint as always is ignoring the interpersonal aspects of this, namely, every Walrus man on the vessel is steaming in righteous indignation and looking for reprisals. Vane slinks off promising that he’ll keep his men in line, but frankly it isn’t his men Billy’s worried about at this point. Worrying about this is the quartermaster’s job, of course, but Mr Scott doesn’t know these men like Billy does. 

And it looks like he’s the lucky bastard that gets to update Flint on the latest developments. Fuck. 

Eventually they’re just wasting ammunition firing the guns at the rubble that used to be Charles Town, and Flint growls to DeGroot to get them underway. He’s stalking off towards his cabin, throwing a few more orders over his shoulder as he goes. 

‘…and where the fuck is Mr Silver? Tell him I want to see him.’ 

The men nearest Flint look uneasily at each other and then look at Billy, and he reluctantly traipses after the captain, who has frozen in place in the doorway, glaring at the blood smeared across the deck and spattered across his map table. 

Billy is close enough to see his face harden further before he finally grates out, ‘Alright, what happened?’

Billy sighs, buying time to organize his thoughts. Flint is staring at the map table as if it’s a compelling logic puzzle. 

‘Vane’s crew were split on the idea of sticking around to retrieve you, Captain. The ones left here to guard us weren’t enough to sail the ship, especially if they were pursued. From what I gather, Mr Vincent told them that Silver could identify ten men who might be persuaded to help them sail her.’ 

Flint’s glare shifts targets, fixing on Billy’s face. 

‘Silver refused, and Vane’s quartermaster laid into his leg with the blunt side of an axe.’

‘Fuck,’ Flint says under his breath, glancing back involuntarily to the map table. ‘Where is he?’

‘With Howell,’ Billy tells him, assuming that he means Silver rather than the quartermaster, who is at the bottom of Charles Town bay by now. 

Flint turns and starts moving back down the deck, attracting a lot of nervous gazes from the crew, who have seen Flint in a snit enough times to be inured to that, but may not have witnessed quite this level of simmering rage before. 

Howell’s makeshift infirmary is surprisingly crowded, but Flint clears the room with a few growled words, leaving just Howell himself, washing his hands in a corner, and Dooley and Muldoon stooped over the figure on the table, whose one foot and bandaged stump are visible from the door. Billy flinches. He’d suspected as much from his first look at the mangled leg, but it’s still sickening to have it confirmed. 

‘There was no saving it, Captain,’ Howell says wearily. ‘He’d’ve been dead in three days.’ 

Flint nods stiffly. 

‘Came off clean, and if he can keep it clear of infection he’s got a good chance.’

Stepping closer, they can see round Muldoon’s back to Silver’s upper body, and to Billy’s relief he’s finally unconscious, limp on the table with Dooley’s hand supporting his head. Dooley gently sets him down and steps back to give the captain room. 

‘He’s just out,’ Howell goes on, voice a little hollow. ‘There wasn’t the time for laudanum beforehand, but I gave him a dose just as we were getting underway. He’ll be out until the morning at least.’ 

‘He was awake?’ Billy says, appalled. 

‘He’s a brave fellow,’ says Dooley firmly, and nobody disputes it, though Billy can remember a time when Silver declared himself a coward. 

‘Why the fuck’s he still shackled?’ Flint demands, still wearing a glare like a fucking cliff face. Flint himself is also still shackled, and seems to have forgotten that fact. 

‘There wasn’t time,’ Howell says, sounding a bit harassed. Billy catches his eye and pulls a face, flicking his gaze at the captain’s rigid back. 

‘I’ll get someone to find the keys,’ he says. 

‘I’ll get ‘em,’ says Dooley, and edges his way out of the room.

Flint shudders and some of his stoniness falls away. Absently, he lays one hand on Silver’s booted remaining foot, surprisingly gentle. 

‘And get him off this table,’ he adds sharply. 

‘He won’t bear a hammock, sir,’ Howell says. ‘The pressure on his wound…’

‘There’s a cot in the great cabin.’ 

Billy and Muldoon exchange glances. ‘Alright. We’ll move him.’ 

They move him on an improvised stretcher made from two long planks of wood, and Billy feels the crew’s gazes following them across the deck like this is a state funeral for a war hero. That quartermaster vote is a foregone conclusion. If Silver lives, there’s a strange future ahead for this crew. 

Flint chases them out of the cabin pretty much as soon as Silver is settled, though by Billy’s estimation there are still things to do—Howell’s done his best with the wound, but it would be cruel to leave Silver in his bloodstained clothes, soaked in the sweat of severe shock. Nobody wants to ask Flint about it, and sure enough the next time Billy has reason to enter the cabin, someone has washed and redressed the unconscious man, and as far as he knows it must have been the captain. 

By the time they reach Tortuga, Silver has been voted quartermaster, and though Howell tells him the outcome while he’s re-dressing the wound, Silver is still too sunk in laudanum to understand him. 

Mostly, he sleeps by the window behind the captain’s desk, and Flint gives every sign of ignoring him completely any time Billy’s in a position to witness, but someone is taking pretty good care of him, and if it’s not Flint then Billy has no fucking idea who it is. With the crew, Flint is as hard-faced as he’s ever been—Mrs Barlow didn’t come back from Charles Town, and Flint hasn’t said a word about it, but Vane tells him in passing that she’s dead. 

Silver emerges on crutches four days later, looking drawn but considerably improved from the last time Billy saw him upright. When they tell him again about the election, he does a decent job of looking surprised.


End file.
